With this equipment, it can detect the tiny changes in brightness in the tens of thousands of stars it is viewing.

Corot is looking for relatively rare events in which a planet crosses in front of its parent star, as viewed from the Earth. This blocks out some of the star's light, causing a tiny dip in its brightness that Corot is tuned to detect.

Every 512 seconds the camera on board can monitor about 10,000 stars in its field to capture any of these small variations in brightness.

Finding a transit will involve a bit luck

The team hopes to find between 10 and 40 planets in each of the five or six star regions it will be looking in, along with hundreds of new gas giant planets similar to our Jupiter.

Simultaneously, the satellite will be probing the insides of stars using a technique called astroseismology.

Similar to seismology, which employs the waves from earthquakes to uncover details about the Earth's interior, Corot will use "starquakes" - waves generated deep inside a star that send ripples across its surface - to learn about more about the object's internal processes.

Starquakes also cause the star's brightness to vary, and Corot's instrumentation is tuned to capture these characteristic changes.

THE TIMETABLE

The launch date for the mission is 27 December. Corot will be lofted on a Soyuz-2-1b vehicle from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, into a circular polar orbit 827km (514 miles) above the Earth.

After a month spent checking the onboard instruments, Corot will begin its observations of surrounding star fields.

It will focus on five to six different areas of the sky, each time for duration of about 150 days.

The mission is scheduled to last approximately 2.5 years.

THE TEAM

Corot is a multinational mission led by the French space agency, Cnes. There are six partners involved: the European Space Agency (Esa), Austria, Spain, Germany, Belgium and Brazil.